Donald Trump Is Going Nuclear
He envisions hundreds of reactors rolling off Valar’s assembly line every year, populating huge groupings of reactors that Valar calls “gigasites,” and possibly, at some point in the future, being installed on Martian soil. The primary obstacle standing in the way of such a future, he explained to me, was the “regulatory matrix.”
Valar has company hats that read “Make Nuclear Great Again,”
“It’s one thing to challenge the status quo and try to innovate,” said Scott Morris, the former number two at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “It’s another to try to go behind closed doors and blow the whole thing up.”
Valar has company hats that read “Make Nuclear Great Again,”
significant piece of Valar’s safety case is its choice of fuel. Called TRISO (for “tristructural isotopic”), the fuel is fabricated so that every uranium particle is encased in a ceramic coating that can withstand extremely high heat and will contain within it nearly all the radioactive fission products that are created as the uranium starts splitting. ………….. The big downsides are that TRISO is expensive to make, and there is very little available. Valar was planning to manufacture its own on-site, but that facility was nothing more than a patch of concrete when I saw it.
As the president explodes the nuclear energy regulatory landscape, hungry startups like Valar Atomics are racing to build new reactors as quickly as possible. But speed comes at what cost?
Colin Jones, The New Republic, May 26, 2026
At 27 years old, with a baby face and a receding hairline, Isaiah Taylor looks like nothing so much as a very large cherub. After dropping out of high school, he launched into entrepreneurship; he has described himself in his professional bio as a “self-taught engineer and 3x founder.” The first two companies were an auto repair shop in northern Idaho and a software system to allow auto repair shops to track the condition of their customers’ vehicles. The third was a nuclear energy startup, Valar Atomics, with hundreds of millions in capital, a factory in El Segundo, California, and a very active social media presence. (Taylor tweets regularly: pictures of him smiling next to the red Tesla that Trump bought from Elon Musk before their falling-out; paeans to God, “the empire,” and “Western civilization”; and more scattered thoughts, like gratitude for a national nuclear laboratory: “Fizz fizz. Fizz fizz. Uranium so good! Thank you Oak Ridge!”)
Taylor founded Valar in 2023. He has said he pitched his company to some 80 different venture capital firms before Stephen Marcus of Riot Ventures gave him his first investment. That was, frankly, a crazy bet: Taylor was only 24 years old and had no real connection to the nuclear industry, apart from a paper brief on his vision. Last year, the bet paid off. In February, Valar announced it had raised $19 million in seed funding and unveiled its first reactor prototype. Then, on May 23, Donald Trump issued four executive orders that have transformed the U.S. nuclear industry. These called for new public subsidies across the entire sector—from enrichment to plant construction to the disposal of radioactive waste. Crucially for startups like Valar, the executive orders also outlined regulatory transformations that would allow companies to build small reactors, load them with fuel, and turn them on without having to go through the painstaking licensing process of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
As news of Trump’s orders broke, Taylor published a manifesto heaping praise on them. (“There’s a new arm to national nuclear security: Dominance. Dominance in civilian nuclear technology development, dominance in nuclear energy infrastructure deployment, dominance in shaping global development.”) The same day, Taylor went live on Bloomberg TV. Alongside Utah Governor Spencer Cox, the young CEO announced that Valar had signed a deal with the state to build an advanced reactor there that would be operational by July 4, 2026. “That’s what the president has asked for,” said Cox. “It’s absolutely possible that we can do that.”
The timeline is immensely ambitious. In a 2021 study (from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, actually), researchers looked at how long it took to build over 500 advanced research reactors “from first concrete pour to criticality” with appropriate safeguards. They found that a majority had taken at least a year to build, with the average time being 32 months. Valar, as well as a handful of other companies selected for the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, are attempting to do the same thing in a fraction of the time. The DOE maintains that three companies are on track to turn something on by the president’s deadline, although it is cagey about which companies exactly. Valar is gunning to be one of them.
Some critics have questioned the wisdom and purpose of this breakneck sprint. Paul Dickman, a retired senior policy fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and an adviser to the Japanese government on the decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex, called it “bullshit” when I spoke with him. “I always tell people I don’t need to wait until July Fourth. I can do it tomorrow. I’m gonna go down to PetSmart and get myself a fish tank. I get myself a California source and a piece of fuel and I’ll have criticality tomorrow,” he said. “Of course I have a lot of dead fish floating around my fish tank, but that’s OK, you know.”
Others have pointed out that the United States has no long-term solution for waste disposal. Or that major questions hang over the economic viability of the small modular reactors most of these companies are building. Or that the reforms Trump has enacted at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission look like regulatory capture. Even further afield, there are those who view the current bipartisan enthusiasm for nuclear energy as a pernicious distraction, given that almost none of these reactors will come online soon enough to service the data-center boom or affect global carbon output in time to evade catastrophic climate change. “The first thing to understand is there isn’t much of a there there,” Allison Macfarlane, director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and former chair of the NRC, told me. “None of these things exist, OK. You can’t go and buy one and have it built tomorrow or even probably 10 years from now. So that’s the reality.”
Thus far these voices have been little more than a distant chorus to the forward march of industry. Asked recently what success looks like for the NRC, Ho Nieh, whom Trump appointed as NRC chair in January, replied, “Shovels in the ground.”
I first spoke with Taylor in summer 2025, a few weeks after Trump’s executive orders were announced. He popped up on my computer screen seated in a rattan chair and ready to give me his pitch. “Most of the time when we’re talking about building reactors, these are like five- to 10-year research projects, which maybe happen, maybe don’t,” he said. “And my whole philosophy in starting the company was like, we have to start moving faster as a country.” China, which had started building out a major domestic nuclear industry only this century, was on pace to overtake the United States in nuclear energy generation within a matter of years. It would require “a massive leap” to catch up. He thought Valar could do it.
Part of the reason I had been interested in Taylor and Valar was that they were such outliers in the field. Taylor has a great-grandfather who worked on the Manhattan Project, but his childhood was spent following his own dad from state to state as he chased white-collar sales work and the like. He says he grew up on food stamps. Their car was once stolen by a family friend, whom they confronted and forgave. I found these details immensely sympathetic when I heard Taylor relate them in an unusually personal interview he gave to the podcaster Shawn Ryan. I felt the same way hearing Taylor speak about his mother’s intelligence and how she used to discuss physics with him when he was a child.
All this cut against some other salient facts of Taylor’s life, which reporters in Salt Lake had been writing about of late, after his company announced it would build a nuclear reactor in their state. Like our secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, Taylor is a member of Christ Church, an institution that was founded and is still run by a pastor named Doug Wilson. Wilson wants an America in which non-Christians would be barred from public office. In a tweet about Wilson, Taylor said he appreciates the pastor’s teaching on “Christian wealth.” For Taylor, that not only means money, but also friends and family and other forms of wealth, although money is a big piece of it. (“Certain exceptions aside, participating in the system of wealth creation is simply blessing your neighbor at scale.”)
More directly related to what Valar was attempting, Taylor had erroneously claimed in a press release posted to X that you could hold spent fuel from his reactor after it had been removed. (“Nuclear engineer here. This statement cannot possibly be true,” Nick Touran, a prominent nuclear commentator and indeed a nuclear engineer, replied to the tweet. Fuel from the kind of reactor Taylor was talking about “would give a person a fatal dose within a few seconds if they were to hold a handful.”) And there was the unfortunate fact that in 2023, months after Taylor founded Valar, his friend and director of business operations, Elijah Froh, had sued Taylor’s other friend and head of operations, Kip Mock, for pouring diesel in a wood-burning stove and inadvertently setting Elijah on fire.
When Taylor and I talked, we focused on his criticisms of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Like most leading nuclear startups today, Valar is pursuing a small modular reactor, or SMR. Its chosen design is cooled with helium gas, and Taylor has called it “the Toyota Camry” of nuclear reactors. (That has to be understood as a proleptic description, as there is currently only one commercial version of such a reactor in operation in the world, and it is in Shandong, China). Also like most of its competitors, Valar has a business model that leans heavily on the notion that it will build its reactors in a factory. For years now, analysts have suggested that bringing construction inside a factory could help avoid the cost and schedule overruns for which the nuclear industry has become notorious. There is the tantalizing likelihood, too, that repeated construction will yield major efficiency gains, as mass production has tended to do for most products. Taylor is particularly captivated by these prospects. He envisions hundreds of reactors rolling off Valar’s assembly line every year, populating huge groupings of reactors that Valar calls “gigasites,” and possibly, at some point in the future, being installed on Martian soil. The primary obstacle standing in the way of such a future, he explained to me, was the “regulatory matrix.”
In April 2025, Valar had joined two other nuclear startups and the states of Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Arizona, and Florida as a plaintiff in a complaint against the NRC. Their case hinged on the claim that the small modular reactors that Valar and other companies planned to build posed “no meaningful risk to ‘the health and safety of the public.’” Because of that, the plaintiff’s lawyer argued, these reactors did not fall under NRC oversight. There was some exegesis of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 involved, but in the main, the suit was asking a judge to adjudicate the basic safety of a broad category of nuclear reactors. To me, the whole thing seemed insane on its face. A report from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity also points out the risk of a “fifty-state patchwork of separate licensing regimes” if regulatory authority were taken from the federal government. But working on the rough heuristic that the Supreme Court had systematically undercut the authority of federal regulators over the past half decade, and that the suit against the NRC was being heard by a member of the Federalist Society, I reckoned Valar and its co-plaintiffs had a reasonable chance of success.
Early in our call, Taylor wanted to show me a chart. “So this is the cumulative U.S. nuclear construction permits over time with Three Mile Island drawn in,” he said. What that looked like on the page was a yellow line ramping upward at a healthy rate from 1955 until 1979, where it was bisected by a vertical red line marking what for Taylor was a diluvian event. That year, in March, a broken valve in the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant precipitated a partial meltdown of the core and the release of a plume of radioactive fission products into the surrounding area. No deaths were directly linked to the disaster, but the U.S. nuclear industry never recovered. On Taylor’s chart, the yellow line effectively flatlined after this point.
There are a host of competing interpretations of exactly what went wrong with the nuclear industry over the 1970s. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
In the past decade or so, though, it has become more common to see arguments that lay the blame at the foot of the NRC. Take, for example, “It’s the Regulation, Stupid,” a 2024 essay from Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute……………………………………………………………………
Taylor shares the deregulatory impulse that lately goes under the slogan of abundance. His lawsuit against the NRC originated with the Abundance Institute and a former Chicago University law professor who, with financial support from the Koch brothers, had created an investment firm dedicated to “regulatory entrepreneurship.”…………………………………………………………………..
The bedrock of all this is his conviction that he should be able to build a reactor and test it without significant interference from the government……………………………………………………………………………………..
“I’ve said to people, an awful lot of what’s currently happening at the NRC feels like an Oklo revenge tour,” one former government official with knowledge of these events said to me. In 2020, Oklo Inc. was the first company to apply to the NRC for a construction permit to build an advanced reactor, or one that is not cooled with water. After two years of acrimonious back and forth, during which Oklo’s application never moved beyond the preliminary review, the NRC sent the company a letter informing it that its application had been rejected. The agency cited Oklo’s failure to provide “detailed technical information responsive to the staff’s requests for details about the safety of [Oklo’s] design.” Oklo’s CEO, Jacob DeWitte, has accused the NRC of screwing up. The executive orders that Trump signed on May 23 last year took Oklo’s side. “Instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the NRC has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion,” reads the second of the four. The same order goes on to call for a “wholesale revision” of the NRC……………………………………………………………….
Beginning in June, DOGE staff and the president also began implementing more direct forms of control. On the 16th, Trump fired Christopher Hanson, a Democratic appointee and the former chair of the NRC’s five-person commission. A steering committee was then stood up and staffed with DOGE affiliates to implement Trump’s executive orders, including the rewriting of the agency’s rules.
So far, their recommendations have suggested changing environmental-impact reviews, cutting the number of inspections for operating plants, allowing nuclear workers to sustain higher doses of radiation, and sunsetting the NRC’s aircraft impact assessment, which requires nuclear power plants to demonstrate that a large plane crashing into the reactor would not produce to a major release of radioactivity. ………………………………………………… . In a recent ProPublica article, a young DOE lawyer who had entered government through DOGE, Seth Cohen, is reported to have commented during an internal meeting: “Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do.”…………………………………………………….
“It’s one thing to challenge the status quo and try to innovate,” said Scott Morris, the former number two at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “It’s another to try to go behind closed doors and blow the whole thing up.”
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Securing a plot at San Rafael let Taylor announce plans to build a test reactor on the same day that the executive orders were announced. From there, things just kept falling into place for him and his company. In August, Valar was selected as one of 10 companies to take part in the DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program. That gave it preference for fuel allotment and a fast track to regulatory approval for its test reactor through the DOE.
All companies in the pilot program benefited from the same structure, but Valar appears to have enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the former DOGE staffers who were spearheading reforms at the NRC. Valar has company hats that read “Make Nuclear Great Again,”
…………………………………………………………………………………….. The real lift for Valar came in November, however, with a Series A funding round led by Snowpoint Ventures, Dream Ventures, and Day One Ventures. (Snowpoint is a major firm founded by a former head of global defense at Palantir. Dream Ventures is a bit of a cypher; it has a website with a logo in one corner and the words “Investing in Extraordinary Dreamers” displayed prominently, with no other information.
Day One Ventures was founded by Masha Drokova, an émigré who was a high-ranking member of Russia’s nationalist youth movement, Nashi, before becoming disenchanted with Vladimir Putin. In the States, she got her start in venture capital while working as Jeffrey Epstein’s publicist from 2017 to 2019. When I asked Valar’s director of communication about Drokova, I was told that she’s not on the board.) The funding round brought in $130 million, much of it from Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer and executive vice president, as well as from Palmer Luckey, the founder and head of the defense company Anduril Industries. (I wrote to both of them asking to speak about their choice to invest in Valar and received a polite no from each.) With that money, Valar had more than enough to build its experimental reactor in Utah. As a first step, it brought its reactor core critical at Los Alamos. Taylor claimed that Valar was the first startup to “split the atom,” rowing that back after it was pointed out that other venture-backed companies had done it years earlier.
Work at the San Rafael Energy Lab moved quickly. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
significant piece of Valar’s safety case is its choice of fuel. Called TRISO (for “tristructural isotopic”), the fuel is fabricated so that every uranium particle is encased in a ceramic coating that can withstand extremely high heat and will contain within it nearly all the radioactive fission products that are created as the uranium starts splitting. ………….. The big downsides are that TRISO is expensive to make, and there is very little available. Valar was planning to manufacture its own on-site, but that facility was nothing more than a patch of concrete when I saw it.
Finally, we entered the reactor building. A large U.S. flag had been stuck to the wall, and the ground was a vast pad of exposed concrete that ran several feet deep. Near the center of this pad, looking somewhat small within the hangar’s voluminous interior, the reactor vessel stood upright, a rounded steel cylinder maybe 15 feet high and painted black. In Valar’s design, helium will draw the heat off the reactor core through a U-shaped pipe that runs through a trench and up again into an Escheresque complex of what looked like off-the-shelf steel ducts. These contained a heat exchanger, a purification system for the helium, and a squat red vessel, studded with steel bolts, that will pump the helium through the system……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://newrepublic.com/article/210095/donald-trump-nuclear-energy-regulations-valar-atomics?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_daily
Why Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Are a Dead End
The big question is, can SMRs deliver on their promises to overcome the historic drawbacks of conventional nuclear power? The answer is no.
Richard Heinberg, May 19, 2026, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/smrs-dead-end
The nuclear power industry is currently promoting designs for small modular reactors, or SMRs, that will supposedly be cheaper, safer, and faster to build than older nuclear power plants. Bill Gates and Amazon are investing in the technology. Moreover, some environmentalists, including Mark Lynas and Bill McKibben, support SMRs in the hope that they can lower carbon emissions. And, according to polls, far more Americans now approve of the development of nuclear energy than was the case just a decade or two ago.
This year, the world has been plunged into a global energy crisis: With the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, nearly a fifth of world oil shipments have been held up, with economic impacts likely to reverberate for months or years. World leaders are suddenly desperate for energy alternatives, and are turning to solar, coal, and nuclear. At the same time, electricity demand for data centers is exploding, and builders of those centers hope to use SMRs to power artificial intelligence (AI).
In short, it looks like a great moment for the nuclear industry.
Yet Indigenous peoples, technology critics, and old-school environmentalists still oppose nukes—even in new, highly touted forms. I agree with their critiques. In this article, we’ll look at the current nuclear revival and see why it may end up being a zombie attack.
Nuclear Renaissance?
Before looking at SMRs specifically, it’s helpful to understand the status of the nuclear industry in more general terms. The industry’s potential resurgence comes after three decades in the doldrums following the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986. Today, roughly 440 nuclear power plants, spread across 30 countries and with a combined net capacity of around 400 gigawatts (GW), provide about 10% of the world’s electricity.
If you think, as I do, that the global polycrisis is an inevitable outgrowth of industrialism and its consequences (resource depletion, pollution, and overpopulation), then you’re likely to view SMRs as a pointless and dangerous waste of resources.
The US, which has the largest number of plants of any country (96), is seeing a slow phaseout of old reactors (average age 44 years), but has commissioned three new ones during the last decade. China is now operating 60 reactors, with up to 40 others under construction. India is likewise hoping to grow its nuclear industry rapidly and is experimenting with fast breeder reactors. Globally, the International Energy Agency forecasts total nuclear power capacity to grow to over 700 GW by 2050, and small modular reactors are expected to make up a significant share of this growth. A year ago, the Trump administration unveiled an ambitious nuclear strategy that includes a goal to quadruple the United States’ nuclear capacity by 2050, with SMRs playing a key role.
The principal drivers of renewed interest in nuclear power are climate change (globally), the Trump administration (in the US), tech companies’ voracious demand for electricity, and Asian nations’ hunger for more industrial power. Most nations want to limit their carbon emissions, and the main low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels are solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear. Solar and wind are intermittent (“variable”) sources, requiring energy storage to align electricity supply with demand. Hydro has limited potential for growth. That leaves nuclear power, which has the advantage of being reliable and steady, and has possibilities for expansion.
If it’s helpful to understand why the industry is growing again, it’s just as important to know the reasons for its long period of dormancy:
Cost: Nuclear power plants are complex and expensive, employing technology that’s internationally regulated due to concerns about proliferation of nuclear weapons. Despite over 80 years of the industry’s development, nuclear plants still take a long time to build and are often plagued with cost overruns.- Fuel: Uranium, the fuel for nearly all existing nuclear power plants, is a depleting nonrenewable resource, and supplies are running short. Uranium mining is a dirty, expensive process, and mine closures, mostly due to resource depletion, are expected to lead to fuel shortfalls by 2035. While geologists have identified more uranium resources, opening new mines will entail further environmental destruction and harm to human communities, of which the uranium mining industry already has a grim history.
- Waste: Despite decades of research, the global nuclear industry still has found no good place to put the 300,000 tons of nuclear waste—as well as 480,000 tons of depleted uranium in the US alone—that it has produced in the last 80+ years.
- Safety: While nuclear accidents are relatively rare, they can be devastating and expensive when they occur. The Fukushima disaster of 2011 resulted in direct cleanup costs of up to $180 billion as of 2016, but the damage still has not been completely contained, and indirect costs to human health have been estimated at half a trillion dollars. Further, nuclear power technology is still tied to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation.
- Water Issues: Nearly all nuclear power plants use water as a coolant and are highly vulnerable to droughts and floods. Droughts reduce the availability of water for cooling, while floods (nuclear plants are generally built next to rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water) damage safety infrastructure and risk contaminating water sources.
If the nuclear industry can overcome its historic obstacles, a door is open. According to the industry, small modular reactors are the main way forward.
SMRs: Promise or Hype?
The main arguments for SMRs are that they would be cheaper and faster to build than conventional power plants; that they would be safer; and, being smaller, that they could be installed to power remote towns or data centers. The idea is to build components in a centralized factory and then assemble those components at power generation sites.
“Small” is defined as 300 megawatts of electrical power or less. While most existing nuclear plants are in the one-gigawatt (1,000 MW) range, some proposed SMRs are 20 megawatts or less; these are called “micro” reactors.
For the most part, SMRs are still at the design stage. China has one SMR under construction. In the United States, TerraPower, founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, has received a permit to build a 345-megawatt (not exactly “small,” but close) sodium-cooled reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
Clearly it is possible to get funding and approval for these new-generation power plants. The big question is, can SMRs deliver on their promises to overcome the historic drawbacks of conventional nuclear power?
- Cost: SMRs will only be cheaper to build if large numbers are ordered; the first prototypes may be even more costly than conventional plants. Meanwhile, construction costs per MW of capacity will likely be higher, and operating costs are largely unknown until real-world data can be collected. The cost of electricity from SMRs is therefore also yet-to-be-determined, but preliminary estimates put it much higher than solar or wind.
- Fuel: Most proposed SMRs use uranium, but some designs on the drawing boards would use depleted uranium or thorium as fuels (see below). For now, however, the uranium fuel constraint looming over the nuclear industry remains in place. SMRs also won’t use their fuel more efficiently than conventional reactors, despite some claims to the contrary.
- Uranium From Seawater: The supply limits of uranium could be greatly expanded by harvesting it from seawater, where the potential resource is enormous—albeit at a concentration of about 3.3 parts per billion. The total oceanic uranium resource is estimated at 4.5 billion tons, over 500 times all identified land-based uranium resources. However, extracting the uranium will take a lot of energy: The best existing technology using absorbent materials will offer an energy return on energy invested (ERoEI) of about 4:1, which is lower than the ERoEI for solar, wind, hydro, fossil fuels, or conventional uranium mining.
- Waste: Some proposed SMR designs would be breeder reactors that could get rid of depleted uranium or even nuclear waste by using them as fuels—but this technology has faced significant challenges (see below). Otherwise, SMRs will do nothing to solve, and may actually worsen, the nuclear waste dilemma.
- Safety: SMRs are designed to be safer than conventional nuclear plants, using passive, gravity-driven cooling systems that don’t require electricity or human intervention to shut down. However, their overall safety is controversial. There is still no real-world data to support the industry’s promises. And having lots of smaller nuclear plants dotted across the landscape could make it easier for nuclear materials to end up in the hands of bad actors. The resilience of SMRs in the face of more frequent and more severe natural disasters is also controversial; a 2021 study concluded that storms, droughts, and higher ambient temperatures linked to climate change are likely to pose operational risks to all nuclear power plants.
The biggest remaining advantages of SMRs are the speed with which they could bedeployed once the manufacturing infrastructure is in place, and the prospect of providing non-grid-tied dedicated power sources for data centers.
What About Further Technological Advances?
When confronted with the limits of one technology, nuclear advocates often shift the conversation to another. However, close examination usually shows that each technological “solution” has its own problems:
Fast-Breeder Reactors: If nuclear fuel is scarce, why not develop fast breeders, which produce more nuclear fuel than they consume? Currently, Russia operates two fast breeders and India’s first one reached criticality in late April. China has a fast-breeder reactor for research. The US, France, and Japan operated breeders in the past but have shut down research along these lines due to high capital and operational costs, safety risks related to sodium coolant, and nuclear proliferation concerns.
- Alternative Cooling Systems: Water-cooled reactors (a category that includes nearly all existing commercial nuclear plants) pose risks of loss-of-coolant accidents due to pipe breaks, high-pressure operation failures, age-related component deterioration, and earthquakes or other natural disasters. The industry’s solution: Use sodium or helium as a coolant. Unfortunately, sodium is highly chemically reactive and ignites upon contact with air and reacts explosively with water, while helium is a depleting non-renewable resource that is becoming economically scarce at a rapid rate.
- Thorium Reactors: If uranium is scarce and might lead to weapons proliferation, why not use more abundant thorium? China already has an experimental two-megawatt thorium reactor in the Gobi Desert. However, thorium reactors have steep development costs and produce a highly radioactive byproduct, uranium-232, which decays into isotopes that emit penetrating gamma rays, making fuel handling and maintenance more hazardous and costly. Also, thorium reactors require a “driver” fuel: Thorium-232 is fertile, not fissile, meaning it needs a different radioactive fuel (like uranium or plutonium) to initiate the chain reaction. Therefore, proliferation concerns remain.
Currently, there is little real-world data regarding these “new” nuclear technologies, even though all have been discussed or experimented with for decades. The nuclear industry hasn’t actually solved its many dilemmas, and the current nuclear renaissance isn’t being driven by novel solutions so much as by the rapid worsening of society’s energy-related problems, primarily climate change: World leaders are now so desperate for reliable low-carbon energy sources that they are willing to overlook substantial risks, if only the nuclear industry will put a shiny gloss on its latest iteration of products. And leaders of the tech industry, keenly aware of the soaring electricity demand from AI, are even more desperate for ways to power the exponential growth of their companies without risking a backlash from the rest of society, which may suffer from higher electricity prices or shortages.
If Not SMRs, Then What?
Nuclear power is a product of high-tech modern industrialism. The proponents of nuclear power assume—and nuclear reactors rely on—global supply chains, uninterrupted grid power, reliable water resources, and functioning political systems. The future that’s unfolding around us is a polycrisis in which supply chains, grid power, water, weather, and politics-as-usual are all threatened. In these unfolding circumstances, the only solutions that make sense are ones that are small-scale, local, low-risk, and nature based.
What to do about carbon emissions? Yes, we need to replace fossil fuels with low-carbon energy sources—but these should be as low-tech as possible, and we should aim to reduce overall energy usage.
What to do about AI data centers? That’s easy: Don’t build them. We are rushing headlong into an AI-managed future without an adequate understanding of what AI is, does, or is likely to do in the future. Besides, AI appears to be perhaps the biggest investment bubble in history.
Most political and economic leaders have taken the attitude that we must go to any possible lengths to save industrial modernity. But industrial modernity is the essence of our problem: It is a crisis-generating machine—and one that, prior to its inevitable self-destruction, is creating enormous wealth for a small minority of people, while entrapping everyone else in dreary systems of employment, payment, debt, dependency, and distraction that leave little time for reflection on the futility of it all.
Moreover, SMRs will do nothing to solve our immediate global energy crisis. The oil shortages that are already sweeping over the world in the wake of the US-Iran war cannot, in most cases, be offset with electricity—at least not right away. While electrification is a good interim energy strategy for gradually winding down modernity with minimal casualties, it’s one that will take time, and some things will be hard or impossible to meaningfully electrify—including heavy manufacturing and air travel. Meanwhile, the world needs gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel now; SMRs will take decades to deploy.
The opinion you hold about SMRs will have a lot to do with your general attitude toward technology. If you think humanity’s fate and future rest with high tech (including AI and advanced rockets to enable colonization of other planets), then you’re almost guaranteed to believe that SMRs will help us get there. But if you think, as I do, that the global polycrisis is an inevitable outgrowth of industrialism and its consequences (resource depletion, pollution, and overpopulation), then you’re likely to view SMRs as a pointless and dangerous waste of resources.
Once we see why industrial modernity is unsustainable, the most important question becomes: What is a viable exit strategy? On our way out the door of modernity and back toward simplicity, we need to minimize the creation of new problems and relearn nature’s elegant solutions. When our priorities are thus reoriented, nuclear power makes no sense.
With launches slated to grow a hundredfold, Space Force seeks more sites, money, people, and AI
Even today’s accelerated pace strains decades-old launch facilities.
Thomas Novelly, Defense One, May 7, 2026
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—The guardians manning screens in the mission-ops center here oversaw the launch of five types of rockets in April, a new record that involved NASA’s Artemis II, the first reused New Glenn booster, and a Falcon 9 lofting the final GPS III satellite. But tomorrow’s Space Force may have no time to mark even epochal missions. Within a decade, service leaders say, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station will be launching hundreds of rockets a year.
To facilitate the Pentagon’s fast-growing demand for orbital capability, the Space Force is looking for more launch sites, more money, more troops, and more AI.
“In 2025, the Space Force saw a drastic increase in mission requirements across space access, global mission operations, and space control. This trend shows no signs of slowing,” Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s top uniformed leader, told House lawmakers last week. “The Space Force we have today is not the Space Force we will need in the future.”
Nestled on a thin stretch of land just miles from nature preserves and cruise-ship ports, the historic Cape Canaveral facility launched 36 rockets in 2021, its first year as a Space Force facility. Last year, it sent 110 into the heavens, while its California counterpart, Vandenberg Space Force Base, launched another 65.
This year, Space Force leaders intend to launch more than 200 rockets from their two main launch sites. And by 2036, they project, the pair will launch as many as 3,000 annually, according to a service document released last month.
That’s going to take more launchpads……………………..
even as the Space Force looks to spread its launches around, Lauderdale said, it also needs to expand and improve its two main bases and “pivot to invest in ways we never did before.”
Pushing policy
The Space Force’s top brass has been making that pitch as well.
Last month at the Space Symposium in Colorado, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman unveiled “Objective Force 2040,” an ambitious vision with a section on expanding the service’s launch capabilities.
“As the space domain becomes increasingly linked both to national security and to economic
prosperity, the importance of space access grows commensurately,” the document said. “This is a significant challenge because the Space Force has supported exponential growth in launch cadence over the past few years using the same physical infrastructure first built decades ago. The future operating environment will only exacerbate this strain, with booming government and commercial demand as well as new mission requirements for responsive and scalable space access.”
The document noted that the service will “expand and certify state, commercial, and private launch sites to address routine launches, increase surge capacity, and provide geographic diversity,” but also noted some spaceports won’t be fully suitable for some missions.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. People problems
Increasing the number of launches will require more than money. Top Space Force officers have recently called for doubling the service’s end-strength over the next decade.
But even that won’t be enough, they say. Guardians will need to lean on AI to help.
“Our manpower is going to change,” said Air Force Col. Douglas Oltmer, commander of Cape Canaveral’s 45th Weather Squadron. “It’s going to have to change to be able to flex to that launch cadence, but we will not be able to do the job in the future the way we’re doing it now. We’re going to have to leverage technology, AI tools a lot more than we’re doing now.” ……………………………………………………… https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2026/05/launches-slated-grow-hundredfold-space-force-seeks-more-sites-money-people-and-ai/413403/
SMRs Aren’t Losing on Technology- They’re Losing on Economics
To put it bluntly: SMRs compete in an economy that no longer exists. Renewables and storage are not just low-carbon. They are modular economic units that can be deployed incrementally, financed through asset-level debt, and brought online quickly enough to generate early revenues. SMRs can generate low-carbon electricity. But they cannot generate early cash flows.
Oil Price, By Leon Stille – May 11, 2026,
- Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are still unlikely to drive the energy transition because renewables, batteries, and grid flexibility attract far more investment, scale faster, and generate quicker returns.
- The main barrier is no longer just technology or timelines, but economics.
- While SMRs may find niche uses in industrial clusters or remote grids, offshore wind, solar, storage, and transmission upgrades are already delivering emissions cuts and energy security today
Small Modular Reactors still won’t shift the Energy Transition, but for a different reason
Last year, I argued that small modular reactors will not save the energy transition. The core reasoning was simple: timelines were too long, costs too uncertain, and grid issues too persistent for SMRs to meaningfully scale in the critical decade ahead. Today, as the UK’s flagship SMR programme unfolds and European policymakers cast fresh doubt on offshore wind targets by pointing to Rolls-Royce’s design, one thing is clear: SMRs remain promised, not delivered. But the missing piece in the debate is no longer just timing, it is market prioritisation and capital competition.
The energy transition is in a race against time. Technologies compete not only to be clean, but to be investable, scalable and system-relevant within the lifespan of existing assets. In that competition, SMRs face structural disadvantages that go far beyond technology readiness.
Why SMRs Compete in the Wrong Economy
In the early rhetoric around SMRs, the narrative was framed as a simple trade-off: renewables bring intermittency and grid stress, nuclear brings dispatchability and firm power. This framing obscured a deeper point. Energy systems are not zero-sum puzzles where one technology simply replaces another. They are investment ecosystems where capital flows to where returns are fastest, risks are lowest and policy support is stable.
Today, that ecosystem overwhelmingly favours renewables, storage and flexibility solutions. Wind and solar are not just cheaper on a levelised cost basis; they integrate more naturally with digital grids, modular financing, and hybrid infrastructure strategies that combine solar, wind, batteries, demand response and interconnection. SMRs, by contrast, are large engineering builds with long lead times and high upfront capital requirements.
The UK’s own SMR timeline underscores this mismatch. The first unit is now expected to be ready for testing around 2030–2032. That means commercial deployment could be a decade after that. In the same period, offshore wind capacity alone in Europe is projected to grow to tens of gigawatts, not hundreds, but enough to reshape grid dynamics, storage markets and decarbonisation pathways well before SMRs arrive.
When capital is scarce, investors do not wait for future returns; they bet on near-term cash flows. This helps explain why renewable projects, battery factories, transmission upgrades and hydrogen early markets are attracting orders of magnitude more private investment than SMRs. The market has already judged where returns are likeliest in the 2020s and early 2030s.
The Myth of Dispatchable Value
Proponents of SMRs argue that dispatchable power is valuable. This is true, but the value is context-dependent. The grid of 2026 already recognises firm capacity mainly through metrics tied to flexibility, not base load. Batteries, demand response, grid balancing markets and sector coupling (including green hydrogen and power-to-x) are all mechanisms that provide firm contribution without nuclear scale and risk.
More importantly, the value of dispatchable nuclear is increasingly decoupled from peak system needs. Today’s grids prioritise fast response, fine-grained balancing rather than slow, heavy baseload adjustments. In that environment, SMRs structurally deliver late, heavy, and rigid capacity rather than fast, flexible, adaptive capacity.
When the UK and other European governments talk about SMRs, the discussion often centres on engineering and regulation. But the real barrier is economics. Nuclear economics are borne from a model built in an age of fully centralised grids and cost-plus financing. That model is misaligned with today’s competitive power markets, where value is increasingly derived from short-duration flexibility, spot pricing, and hybrid energy packages.
SMRs and Industrial Strategy
This is not to say SMRs have no future. In specific industrial contexts, heavy industrial clusters, remote non-interconnected grids, certain process heat applications, SMRs could be a useful tool. But that does not make them central to decarbonisation at scale.
Europe’s energy transition is not only about electricity. It is about electrification of heat, transport and industry, grid flexibility, and system integration. Offshore wind, for all its critics, delivers carbon-free electrons today. It creates entire industrial supply chains, workforce development pathways and export sectors. SMRs create jobs too, but only after a decade of development, regulation, licensing and capital deployment.
This mismatch is not trivial. Public budgets and political capital are finite. When policymakers debate whether to prioritise a gigawatt of wind or invest in a nuclear unit that might deliver in the next decade, the choice reflects not only technology readiness but opportunity cost.
Timelines Are Only the Surface Issue
Critics of SMRs often focus on schedule slippage. That is a real issue. But it is a symptom, not the fundamental problem. The deeper reality is that the global energy transition prioritises technologies that can deliver measurable impact within this decade. Market forces, investor preferences and policy frameworks all align with that priority. Expecting SMRs to become a backbone of the system …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/SMRs-Arent-Losing-on-Technology-Theyre-Losing-on-Economics.html
Japan faces tough road ahead over nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant
Japan Times, 10 May 26,
Japan still faces a tough road ahead over the construction of a spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Aomori Prefecture, whose completion date has been moved back 27 times.
With less than a year to go until the current deadline at the end of next March, Japan Nuclear Fuel is in time-consuming exchanges with the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) over the plant.
The completion “will definitely be delayed” again, Aomori Gov. Soichiro Miyashita has said. Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara has said that the deadline remains unchanged.
Japan Nuclear Fuel began the construction of the plant, a key component of the country’s nuclear energy policy, in the village of Rokkasho in 1993, originally planning to complete it in 1997.
Delays primarily stemmed from a series of problems, including those with some equipment, before northeastern Japan was struck by the massive March 2011 earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent nuclear accident at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima No. 1 power plant.
After the triple disaster, Japan significantly tightened nuclear safety standards. The NRA’s lengthy regulatory review to ensure the Rokkasho plant’s compliance with the standards led to delays in recent years.
The regulatory watchdog finished examining the plant’s basic design in 2020 and then started a detailed design review, which is still going on.
When Japan Nuclear Fuel announced its 27th postponement in the summer of 2024, it said it would complete its submissions to the NRA by November 2025 and win the body’s approval by March this year, but the plans have not progressed as scheduled………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/05/10/japan/japan-nuclear-fuel-reprocessing/
With launches slated to grow a hundredfold, Space Force seeks more sites, money, people, and AI
Even today’s accelerated pace strains decades-old launch facilities.
Defense One Thomas Novelly, Senior Reporter, May 7, 2026
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—The guardians manning screens in the mission-ops center here oversaw the launch of five types of rockets in April, a new record that involved NASA’s Artemis II, the first reused New Glenn booster, and a Falcon 9 lofting the final GPS III satellite. But tomorrow’s Space Force may have no time to mark even epochal missions. Within a decade, service leaders say, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station will be launching hundreds of rockets a year.
To facilitate the Pentagon’s fast-growing demand for orbital capability, the Space Force is looking for more launch sites, more money, more troops, and more AI.
“In 2025, the Space Force saw a drastic increase in mission requirements across space access, global mission operations, and space control. This trend shows no signs of slowing,” Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s top uniformed leader, told House lawmakers last week. “The Space Force we have today is not the Space Force we will need in the future.”
Nestled on a thin stretch of land just miles from nature preserves and cruise-ship ports, the historic Cape Canaveral facility launched 36 rockets in 2021, its first year as a Space Force facility. Last year, it sent 110 into the heavens, while its California counterpart, Vandenberg Space Force Base, launched another 65.
This year, Space Force leaders intend to launch more than 200 rockets from their two main launch sites. And by 2036, they project, the pair will launch as many as 3,000 annually, according to a service document released last month.
That’s going to take more launchpads…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Pushing policy
The Space Force’s top brass has been making that pitch as well.
Last month at the Space Symposium in Colorado, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman unveiled “Objective Force 2040,” an ambitious vision with a section on expanding the service’s launch capabilities.
“As the space domain becomes increasingly linked both to national security and to economic prosperity, the importance of space access grows commensurately,” the document said. “This is a significant challenge because the Space Force has supported exponential growth in launch cadence over the past few years using the same physical infrastructure first built decades ago. The future operating environment will only exacerbate this strain, with booming government and commercial demand as well as new mission requirements for responsive and scalable space access.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
People problems
Increasing the number of launches will require more than money. Top Space Force officers have recently called for doubling the service’s end-strength over the next decade.
But even that won’t be enough, they say. Guardians will need to lean on AI to help. ………………………….. The Objective Force document calls for a service that can “operate at machine speed, leveraging artificial intelligence and autonomous systems while maintaining the primacy of human judgment for critical decisions.”……………………. https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2026/05/launches-slated-grow-hundredfold-space-force-seeks-more-sites-money-people-and-ai/413403/?oref=defense_one_breaking_nl&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Defense%20One:%20Breaking%20%285/7%29%20launches&utm_term=newsletter_d1_alert
The World’s Biggest Fusion Reactor Just Hit a Milestone
By Haley Zaremba – May 06, 2026,
- The final components of ITER’s central solenoid magnet — a 59-foot, 3,000-tonne superconducting system 15 years in the making — have arrived in France, clearing a major path toward first plasma.
- ITER will never supply electricity to the grid; it exists purely as a research tool, and at €22 billion and counting, it’s still years from achieving its primary milestone.
- A wave of well-funded private fusion startups is on track to hit the same technical benchmarks as ITER faster and more cheaply — raising real questions about the megaproject’s relevance even as it celebrates progress……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Worlds-Biggest-Fusion-Reactor-Just-Hit-a-Milestone.html
Yukon and Ontario and SMRs – Memorandum of Misunderstanding?
The Yukon public and their elected representatives may not fully understand the implications of introducing small modular nuclear reactors into their electricity mix.
The governments of Yukon and Ontario recently signed a partnership agreement to share Ontario’s expertise about energy development, which includes evaluation of small modular and micro-reactors. The Yukon wants to reduce reliance on diesel while meeting increasing electricity demand.
There are glaring problems with this memorandum of understanding.
First: the Ontario government cannot share what it doesn’t know. There has not been a single successful commercial SMR built worldwide. Construction of the much-touted Darlington New Nuclear Project in Ontario has barely begun.
Second: There is little private investment interest in this technology due to:
- the extraordinarily high cost ($7.7 billion for the first BWRX-300 SMR at Darlington),
- long timeline to completion (nuclear reactors have taken years longer than expected to build.)
- risks associated with accidents
Third: The Ontario public bears the full cost of building and maintaining Ontario’s reactors, remediating environmental damage, the costs of decommissioning reactors at their end of life, and management of the radioactive waste for which there is no feasible solution. Can Yukon afford this expensive electricity source?
Fourth: Nuclear reactors are notoriously unreliable; some are offline for long periods of time, like Point Lepreau in New Brunswick (which operated only 27% of the time in the 2024-2025 fiscal year), requiring diesel or gas backup to meet electricity demands.
Nuclear Scaling Requires Discipline. SMRs Deliver Fragmentation.
the evidence does not support treating SMRs as a broad, near-term, commercially validated solution
Michael Barnard, Clean Tecnica 28th April 2026, https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/28/nuclear-scaling-requires-discipline-smrs-deliver-fragmentation/
When I wrote in 2021 that small modular reactors were mostly bad policy (peer reviewed version, CleanTechnica version), the argument was not that nuclear fission could not produce useful low-carbon electricity. It was already doing so every day. The United States had about 98 GW of operating nuclear capacity, and the global fleet was a major source of firm generation. The question was whether the SMR policy proposition matched the conditions under which nuclear power had scaled in the past. It did not then. The evidence since then has made the problem clearer.
The original SMR case rested on a simple promise. Make reactors smaller, build more of them in factories, reduce capital at risk, shorten construction schedules, serve more sites, and avoid the large-project failures that had damaged recent nuclear construction in liberalized electricity markets. It was an appealing story because it pointed at real nuclear problems. Large reactors are expensive to finance. They take a long time to build. A single failure can consume a utility’s balance sheet and a government’s political patience. A smaller unit sounds easier to manage.
But the promise depended on a condition that was often treated as background noise. SMRs only make economic sense if the sector converges on a few designs and builds them many times. Factory manufacturing does not create a learning curve because the word factory appears in a presentation. Learning curves come from repeated production of the same or similar products, with stable tooling, stable suppliers, stable inspections, stable quality assurance, stable training, and steady demand. Solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines became cheaper because the world made huge numbers of related products in shorter production cycles. Nuclear reactors are different. Each design carries a safety case, a fuel qualification pathway, licensing work, site work, security, emergency planning, operator training, waste arrangements, and decades of liability.
That was the central weakness in the SMR story in 2021. In that earlier assessment, I counted 57 SMR designs and concepts across 18 broad types, and none could be considered dominant. That was already far too fragmented for a credible manufacturing-learning argument. Since then, the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s SMR dashboard has tracked more than 120 SMR technologies worldwide, with roughly 70 to 80 included in recent dashboard editions after filtering out some paused, inactive, unfunded, or non-participating designs. The sector has not moved from many concepts to a few winners. It has become more crowded.
This matters because nuclear design proliferation is not cheap experimentation. In software, a hundred teams can try different approaches, fail fast, and leave lessons behind. In nuclear, each credible design requires scarce engineering, regulatory, fuel-cycle, owner, and supply-chain attention. A light-water SMR, a high-temperature gas reactor, a sodium fast reactor, a molten-salt reactor, and a microreactor are not minor variations around a shared product platform. They create different materials questions, fuel requirements, operating temperatures, inspection regimes, safety cases, and licensing pathways.
The EIA’s April 2026 Today in Energy article is useful because it lays out that diversity. It groups U.S.-relevant SMRs and microreactors into light-water reactors, high-temperature gas reactors, molten-salt reactors, sodium-cooled reactors, and other designs. It identifies applications such as AI loads, data centers, industrial sites, remote areas, microgrids, and military or federal facilities. It points to DOE programs, pilot pathways, and fuel-chain efforts. As a map of activity, it has value. As a test of whether the SMR proposition is becoming a real deployment class, it is much weaker.
The EIA article does not ask the questions that matter for scaling. It does not ask whether the order book is large enough to support factory learning. It does not ask whether design proliferation undermines standardization. It does not ask whether the credible projects are really small, or whether they are drifting back toward conventional power-station scale. It does not ask whether remote sites, mines, and islands are large enough markets to sustain a reactor manufacturing industry. It does not ask whether HALEU will be available at scale on the timelines implied by advanced reactor plans. It describes activity and optionality. It does not demonstrate convergence.
The historical conditions for nuclear scaling are not mysterious. Nuclear built at scale where it was treated as a national strategic program, where the state played a strong role, where designs were standardized or semi-standardized, where large reactors spread fixed costs over a lot of output, where experienced nuclear owner-operators existed, where training and safety culture were centralized, and where governments sustained programs for decades. France, South Korea, and China did not scale nuclear power by letting dozens of small reactor startups compete for scattered boutique sites. They scaled, to the extent they did, through alignment among state policy, utilities, vendors, regulators, finance, and workforce.
SMRs were sold as a way around these conditions. The actual market is rediscovering them. The projects that look most likely to be built are tied to existing nuclear sites, state-backed strategic sites, experienced utilities, military or laboratory settings, or large industrial anchors with public support. That does not mean they are worthless. It means they are not validating the broad SMR pitch. They are validating the old lesson that nuclear needs strong institutions.
The most credible projects are also getting bigger. Ontario’s Darlington project is the clearest Western example. Ontario Power Generation has a license to construct one GE Hitachi BWRX-300 at Darlington, with four units planned. Each unit is about 300 MW. This is a serious project, but it is not a small reactor scattered into a new class of sites. It is a 300 MW boiling water reactor at an existing nuclear site, backed by an experienced provincial nuclear operator with grid interconnection, cooling access, security culture, political support, and a long-term system need. If it succeeds, it will matter. But it will not prove that SMRs can escape nuclear’s institutional requirements.
China’s Linglong One, the ACP100 at Changjiang in Hainan, is another real project. At about 125 MW, it is closer to the traditional idea of a small reactor, and it has moved through construction and testing milestones. But it exists inside China’s state-led nuclear program. China can choose, license, finance, build, and integrate nuclear projects in ways that liberalized markets struggle to copy. That makes Linglong One important, but it does not make it proof that a global commercial SMR market has arrived.
TerraPower’s Natrium project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, is serious as well, with a construction permit issued by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and non-nuclear site work underway. But Natrium is 345 MW, with storage-boosted output advertised around 500 MW. It sits above the old 300 MW SMR threshold and depends on sodium cooling, HALEU fuel, major public support, and a coal-site transition narrative. It may become a useful advanced reactor demonstration. It is not evidence that small, repeatable, low-risk nuclear products are ready for broad deployment.
Rolls-Royce makes the size drift even more obvious. Its reactor is about 470 MW. Three units at Wylfa would total about 1.4 GW, which is a large power station by any normal electricity-system measure. The unit is small only compared with the largest conventional reactors. It may fit the United Kingdom’s industrial strategy if the government commits to a fleet. But at 470 MW, the project is better understood as a medium reactor with modular construction ambitions than as the small product implied by early SMR rhetoric.
Holtec’s design history points the same way. The SMR-160 became the SMR-300. NuScale’s module moved from 50 MW toward 77 MW, and the commercial plant concept became a multi-module station approaching conventional plant scale. X-energy’s Xe-100 is about 80 MW as a module, but Dow’s proposed Seadrift project packages four units into about 320 MW. The pattern is clear. The more serious the customer discussion becomes, the more the sector tries to put several hundred MW behind a single site, operating organization, licensing file, security plan, and grid connection.
That is not an accident. Nuclear has large fixed costs that do not shrink in proportion to reactor size. A 50 MW reactor does not need one-twentieth of the licensing effort, one-twentieth of the security analysis, one-twentieth of the operator training, one-twentieth of the emergency planning, one-twentieth of the quality assurance, or one-twentieth of the waste arrangements of a 1,000 MW reactor. Some hardware costs scale down. Many institutional costs do not. Smaller reactors start with a scale penalty. Factory repetition is supposed to overcome it. But repetition requires a narrow set of designs and a large order book. The current market offers neither.
After years of SMR hype, the likely-build list remains short: Darlington, Linglong One, Natrium in Wyoming, TVA’s Clinch River, Dow’s Seadrift project, Holtec’s proposed Palisades units, Rolls-Royce at Wylfa, and Russian RITM-based Arctic or floating projects. That is not nothing, but it is not a broad commercial market. It is a small order book of state-backed, utility-backed, or strategic projects, often tied to existing nuclear or heavy-industrial sites, often larger than the original SMR story implied, and often dependent on public risk absorption. By contrast, the press-release order book is filled with memoranda of understanding, technology selections, data-center announcements, export discussions, remote-site narratives, and vendor road maps. Those are not reactors. Nuclear projects have a long valley between interest and electrons.
HALEU sits near the center of the problem, not at the edge of it. Several advanced reactor designs require higher-assay low-enriched uranium, enriched above the 3% to 5% U-235 common in today’s light-water reactor fuel but below 20%. HALEU can support smaller cores, longer operating cycles, higher burnup, and reactor designs that standard low-enriched uranium cannot support. That is why developers want it. It is also why it is a bottleneck.
The United States does not yet have a mature, large, domestic HALEU supply chain. Russia has been the major commercial source, which is now a strategic and political problem. Rebuilding a domestic chain requires conversion, enrichment, deconversion, fuel fabrication, transport packages, licensing, inspections, safeguards, workforce, and customer commitments. Each link needs facilities, capital, permits, contracts, and time. This is not a paperwork problem. It is an industrial-base problem.
There is a circular dependency at the heart of it. Reactor developers need HALEU to make credible deployment commitments. Fuel suppliers need credible reactor demand to justify investment. Customers need confidence that both reactor and fuel will be available. Regulators need data on fuel behavior and safety. Government can break pieces of the loop by funding fuel production and demonstration quantities, but that confirms that the strategy is government-led. It does not show that advanced SMRs are market-ready.
HALEU also makes design proliferation more damaging. A narrow reactor program using a common fuel form creates a clearer demand signal. A market with many designs, fuel forms, enrichments, geometries, claddings, coolants, and operating conditions creates a harder investment problem. Fuel suppliers are not being asked to serve one standardized fleet. They are being asked to prepare for a moving set of possible reactor futures. If HALEU is a gating condition for deployment, then public policy should be narrowing the field, not celebrating breadth.
This is where U.S. energy policy becomes confused. The United States has a rational nuclear policy layer and a speculative nuclear policy layer. The rational layer is preserving safe existing reactors, extending licenses where appropriate, uprating existing units, restarting recently retired units where the equipment and economics support it, and strengthening the workforce and fuel system. Existing plants have grid connections, trained operators, known safety records, community relationships, cooling systems, and regulatory histories. Keeping a safe reactor operating can avoid large volumes of fossil generation with much less uncertainty than a first-of-a-kind new build.
The speculative layer is treating a fragmented SMR sector as if it were already a deployable answer to new load growth. DOE’s UPRISE initiative, which emphasizes uprates, restarts, license extensions, and improvements to existing reactors, belongs largely in the practical bucket. A $900 million Gen III+ SMR funding opportunity belongs in the option-value and industrial-policy bucket. It may help one or two designs move forward. It may produce learning. But it is not proof that the commercial case exists.
Read more: Nuclear Scaling Requires Discipline. SMRs Deliver Fragmentation.AI has become the new accelerant for this policy story. Data centers want large amounts of firm power, often on fast schedules. U.S. policymakers are concerned about electricity demand growth from AI, data centers, and advanced manufacturing. Nuclear advocates see an opening. The problem is timing. Data centers are being planned and built on two-year to five-year horizons. First-of-a-kind nuclear projects move through design completion, licensing, site work, supply-chain development, fuel procurement, construction, testing, and commissioning on longer timelines. Existing nuclear plants can serve some corporate procurement needs. Restarts and uprates may help in some places. SMRs are not close enough to be the main answer to near-term AI load.
Data centers are a shaky foundation for SMR strategy in any event because the AI electricity panic has already started to look familiar. As I argued in a January 2025 CleanTechnica piece, every wave of digital growth has produced claims that data centers were about to overwhelm the grid, from the dot-com boom to cloud computing, streaming, remote work, blockchain, and now AI. The pattern has been repeated concern, then hardware, software, architecture, and market optimization. U.S. data centers were about 1.5% of electricity consumption in the 2006 EPA report and only about 1.8% in 2014, despite the internet becoming central to daily life. Even with AI, the article noted data centers at about 4.4% of U.S. electricity demand in 2022, material but not world-ending.
Data centers are a shaky foundation for SMR strategy in any event because the AI electricity panic has already started to look familiar. As I argued in a January 2025 CleanTechnica piece, every wave of digital growth has produced claims that data centers were about to overwhelm the grid, from the dot-com boom to cloud computing, streaming, remote work, blockchain, and now AI. The pattern has been repeated concern, then hardware, software, architecture, and market optimization. U.S. data centers were about 1.5% of electricity consumption in the 2006 EPA report and only about 1.8% in 2014, despite the internet becoming central to daily life. Even with AI, the article noted data centers at about 4.4% of U.S. electricity demand in 2022, material but not world-ending.
That is the core policy failure. U.S. SMR policy is confusing aspiration, option value, and industrial strategy with deployment readiness. Policymakers want SMRs to support AI growth, military resilience, export competition, coal-site redevelopment, industrial heat, fuel-cycle rebuilding, and decarbonization before the sector has demonstrated cost, schedule, fuel readiness, repeat construction, or customer depth. That is misguided boosterism. It takes a category that should be treated as a narrow, risky, publicly supported technology option and presents it as if it were a near-term pillar of energy strategy.
Microreactors and remote-site claims should be separated from utility-scale SMRs. Military bases, national laboratories, and research campuses are credible early niches because they have strategic reasons to accept higher cost, unusual risk, and federal procurement structures. Project Pele at Idaho National Laboratory, a 1 MW to 5 MW transportable reactor demonstration for the Department of Defense, fits that category. It is strategic procurement. It is not evidence of normal commercial electricity competitiveness.
Remote communities, mines, and islands are weaker as broad markets. They have real energy problems, including high diesel costs, reliability challenges, fuel logistics, and limited grid access. But the alternatives are improving and being built now. Mines in Western Australia have deployed hybrid systems with solar, wind, batteries, controls, demand management, and gas or diesel backup. Gold Fields’ Agnew project has delivered roughly 50% to 60% renewable energy over the long term. Liontown’s Kathleen Valley project targets more than 60% renewable power from startup. Those systems are modular, financeable, serviceable by normal industrial contractors, and expandable in pieces. They do not require nuclear licensing, nuclear operators, HALEU supply, nuclear waste arrangements, or a nuclear security regime.
The same logic applies to islands and remote communities. Solar, wind where resources are good, batteries, thermal storage, demand response, efficiency, heat pumps, and retained backup can reduce fuel imports and improve resilience without importing the full institutional weight of a nuclear facility. A microreactor may make sense for a sovereign military site, a national laboratory, or a nuclear-capable jurisdiction with a strategic reason to pay for it. That is different from a scalable business model. When an energy technology retreats to remote sites as a leading commercial story, it is often no longer arguing that it is broadly competitive. It is arguing that unusual constraints may hide its disadvantages.
A rational policy would stop treating optionality as progress. If governments believe SMRs are strategically necessary, then they should fund discipline. Pick one or two designs for fleet deployment. Put them at nuclear-capable sites first. Require transparent cost and schedule reporting. Separate first-of-a-kind cost from claimed nth-of-a-kind cost. Tie public support to standardization, real orders, fuel readiness, and repeat construction. Do not count MOUs as demand. Do not pretend that every data-center press release is a reactor order.
Licensing reform can help, but it is not a substitute for a market. The ADVANCE Act and related U.S. efforts to make NRC processes more timely and predictable are reasonable in principle. Regulators should be efficient while maintaining safety and security. But if dozens of designs seek attention, faster licensing does not solve the deeper problem. The bottleneck moves to design maturity, fuel, supply chain, owner capability, financing, construction execution, and public acceptance.
The policy mistake is not supporting any SMR development. Governments often buy option value, and there can be reasons to maintain nuclear engineering capacity, preserve strategic fuel-cycle skills, support a few demonstrations, and keep an export option alive. The mistake is presenting a fragmented, fuel-constrained, thinly ordered technology class as if it were a central answer to near-term electricity demand, AI growth, or industrial decarbonization. That is boosterism, not rational energy policy.
The update to the 2021 conclusion is straightforward. The success conditions have not been met. The sector has not consolidated. The credible projects are getting larger. The real builds are mostly attached to existing nuclear sites, state-backed programs, or strategic industrial contexts. HALEU remains a hard constraint. Remote-site narratives remain niche claims. Small, modular, advanced, factory-built, flexible, and deployable are claims that have to survive contact with licensing, fuel, siting, security, staffing, waste, construction, financing, and repeat orders. Some reactors will likely be built. Some may be useful. But the evidence does not support treating SMRs as a broad, near-term, commercially validated solution. It supports the older and less exciting conclusion that nuclear scale requires focus, standardization, strong institutions, mature fuel supply, and a long program. The SMR sector is still moving in the opposite direction.
Nuclear Fusion’s Funding Rush Comes With a Catch
By Leonard Hyman & William Tilles – Apr 27, 2026, https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Nuclear-Fusions-Funding-Rush-Comes-With-a-Catch.html
- Fusion firms are turning to SPACs for funding, using faster, less restrictive public-market routes to raise the massive capital needed for commercialization.
- SPACs offer speed but come with heavy downsides, including significant equity dilution, weak investor protections, and high risk—often likened to “junk” equity.
- Investments remain highly speculative, as fusion companies are still pre-revenue R&D ventures with uncertain technological outcomes despite growing momentum.
As nuclear fusion technologies move towards commercialization, the industry will need hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of new capital, either from public or private sources, in order to grow. Two nuclear fusion companies have chosen to access the public capital markets via special purpose acquisition corporations. (SPACs).which are often referred to as “blank check companies” because investors give money to a sponsor, typically an investment bank, to find a good business to invest in, without knowing in advance where the money will go.
Before going into specifics, we should explain how a SPAC works. It is an equity vehicle that affords the issuer both advantages and disadvantages over a conventional equity offering via an initial public offering (IPO). There are two principal advantages to SPACs from an issuer’s perspective. They can be offered more quickly than an IPO, and they also do not require pesky financial details like earnings forecasts and cash flow projections. SPACs are a financing vehicle for companies with big ideas, lots of potential, but zero revenues. There are two major downsides to this financial structure, though. First, the sponsor takes a big chunk of the equity as its fee, so there’s a lot of equity dilution right at the outset, like 30%+ dilution. The sponsors typically also receive warrants, which, when exercised, further increase the stock float and exacerbate dilution. And then there’s the phantom equity problem. SPAC investors can demand their money back from the sponsor, typically $10 per share if no investment has been made. However, the outstanding shares are not retired, and this also exacerbates a stock dilution problem.
As if to prove our point, one of the first nuclear fusion companies to form a SPAC, TAE Enterprises, formerly Tri Alpha Energy, did so in a 50-50 merger with the President’s Trump Media and Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social. The CEO of TAE, and Truth Social’s CEO, former congressman Devin Nunes, were to be co-heads of this new venture. Mr. Nunes has been fired. Nevertheless, TAE is a real technological competitor in the nuclear fusion race. Its newest reactor, called Copernicus, uniquely uses hydrogen-boron fuel (versus deuterium-tritium in more conventional systems). The advantage is a great diminution in radioactive waste, but the extreme temperatures needed, 1-5 billion degrees Celsius, pose ignition challenges. TAE previously raised over a billion dollars from Google, Chevron, and others and, like everyone else, expects to have a commercial reactor operating in the early 2030s. TAE’s field-reversed configuration of magnetic confinement loosely resembles a tokamak, but with a much simpler, cheaper architecture.
A second company, General Fusion, announced plans to go public via a SPAC shortly after TAE. Its sponsor, more conventionally, is a Dallas-based investment bank, and its SPAC is called the Spring Valley Acquisition Corporation III (that’s Roman numeral three). Deal number one, by the way, was the SMR company NuScale. That deal is expected to close some time around mid-year, and the company plans to be NASDAQ-listed under the stock ticker GFUZ. General Fusion describes its magnetized target fusion (MTF) technology as a more practical fusion alternative to both tokamak and laser-driven systems. The value of this transaction was expected to be about $1 billion at closing.
Lastly, we want to mention Zap Energy which is developing the so-called “sheared flow stabilized Z-pinch fusion technology” and is often cited as next in line to go public in some form. Zap has raised over $300 million dollars from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Chevron, Mizuho, Soros Foundation, and others. Zap’s website describes the company as “building a seriously cheap, compact, scalable fusion energy technology with potentially the shortest path to commercially viable fusion and (using) orders of magnitude less capital than traditional approaches.” Zap’s website also teases the competitors with a large headline stating, “No Magnets Needed.
People often ask us whether SPACs are an appropriate investment vehicle for typical retail investors. The short answer is no. The long answer is also no, by the way. And that’s for a simple reason. These SPACs are not businesses in the conventional sense of the term. They are late stage research and development projects looking to establish a technological proof of design or a working prototype. They will consume vast amounts of capital for research with no associated revenues for years. And who knows which of these competing technologies will ultimately prevail in the energy marketplace and which will be discarded as ultimately impractical. In a way, the SPAC financial format, as we suggested earlier, is like a non-investment grade rating, but for equities, which should serve as a warning for potential investors. It’s a high cost, high risk financial structure, but perhaps one not inappropriate to the business of trying to capture the sun in a magnetic bottle as some have labeled the pursuit of nuclear fusion.
Satellites launched for coming war on China
Space Development Agency launches first operational satellites
By Courtney Albon, Sep 11, 2025, https://www.defensenews.com/space/2025/09/10/space-development-agency-launches-first-operational-satellites/
The Space Development Agency launched its initial batch of operational satellites on Wednesday, kicking off a 10-month campaign to deliver more than 150 satellites to low Earth orbit.
The 21 satellites, all built by York Space Systems, flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The spacecraft are part of SDA’s Transport Layer, designed to provide fast, secure communication capability to military operators.
The launch represents a new phase for SDA, which since 2019 has been crafting plans for a large constellation of government-owned missile tracking and data transport satellites in low Earth orbit. Its first spacecraft, Tranche 0, launched in 2023 and 2024 and have been used to demonstrate capabilities like laser communication between satellites, with the ground and recently between a commercial partner’s satellite and an SDA terminal installed on an aircraft in flight.
Once on orbit, the Tranche 1 satellites launched today will build on that work. Following initial payload health and safety checks, the spacecraft could start providing operational capability to combatant commands and other users within four to six months, according to acting SDA Director Gurpartap Sandhoo.
“This is the first time we’ll be able to start working with our COCOMs, our joint force to start integrating space into their operations and getting the warfighters used to using space from this construct,” Sandhoo told reporters prior to the launch. “This is the first time we’ll have the space layer fully integrated into our warfare operations.”
SDA’s first user group, whom Sandhoo called “early adopters,” includes military operators in the Indo-Pacific. This initial work is key, he added, to familiarize the services and combatant commands with the capability SDA can provide.
“Doing the warfighter immersion is going to be critical because they have to get trained on this and we have to provide this capability,” Sandhoo said. “That’s what Tranche 1 will start doing.”
Tranche 1 will include 154 satellites — 126 for the Transport Layer and 28 for the Tracking Layer. The first 21 spacecraft will bring a limited coverage and capacity, but that will increase over time as more reach orbit.
Starting with today’s launch, SDA plans to fly a new batch of Tranche 1 satellites each month for 10 months, with six of those missions carrying transport spacecraft and four flying missile warning and tracking satellites. The first few launches will be dedicated transport missions, but Sandhoo said tracking satellites will start to fly early next year.
The next mission is slated for mid-October and will feature satellites built by Lockheed Martin.
By the end of Tranche 1, Sandhoo said, SDA hopes to be providing regional capacity. Tranche 2, scheduled to start launching in late 2026, will further expand the constellation’s reach.
The agency is making headway on future missile tracking capabilities beyond Tranche 2 — which could provide essential support for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile shield — but the longer-term future of the Transport Layer is uncertain. The effort is fully funded through Tranche Two, but the Space Force has paused work on Tranche 3 amid an ongoing study considering whether the constellation is the best solution to meet the U.S. military’s data transport needs.
Sandhoo said the stalled funding will delay SDA’s plans to expand from regional to global transport coverage.
Space Loos, Lunar Exploitation and Colonial Escapism: The Artemis II Mission
22 April 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/space-loos-lunar-exploitation-and-colonial-escapism-the-artemis-ii-mission/
The Earth is in a fine mess, but human beings sealed in laboratories full of energy and vigour, attached to screens, and running tests about conditions in space, have another reason to cheer. Between April 1 and April 11, the Artemis II undertook a flyby of the Moon and returned safely. News bulletins, life stream feeds and podcasts afforded it saturating room and coverage. This was the first Moon mission with a crew in over five decades. Cue, then, for the grand claims, the exaggerated hopes, the silliness of it all.
Absurdly, the effort is being heralded as a collective push by humanity despite its distinct NASA credentials, yet another instance of coarse patriotism yoking itself to scientific endeavour. This is an American gig, and it will be assessed along with every other expensively patriotic mission launched by any number of States believing that the dark side of the moon is the next big thing in competition and exploitation. President Donald Trump’s Executive Order of December 2025 promises “American space superiority,” with the Artemis Program intended to return “Americans to the Moon by 2028,” “assert American leadership in space, lay the foundations for lunar development, prepare for the journey to Mars, and inspire the next generation of American explorers”.
It is also worth considering the statement by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman made in March: “NASA is committed to achieving the near-impossible once again, to return to the Moon before the end of President Trump’s term, build a Moon base, establish an enduring presence, and do the other things needed to ensure American leadership.” Nothing about humanity here so much as a bald MAGA admission that, “The clock is running in this great-power competition, and success and failure will be measured in months, not years.”
Just to complete the trio of examples, Sean Duffy, when he was acting NASA Administrator, did not shy away from the messianic zeal of the American space program. In an internal staff briefing held last year, he was unambiguous that the US had to get to the Moon before China before venturing on to Mars. This was only natural, as his country had a “manifest destiny to the stars.”
Colonial pursuits are often preceded by the spirit of discovery, economic reconnaissance, inquiry. Then comes the appropriation, the brazen theft, the seizure wrapped in the jolly packaging of blood, civilisation and empire. Thankfully, in this case, there are no indigenous populations to exterminate, no extant human cultures to extinguish. That extermination will take the form of great powers vying over rare mineral real estate as an exercise in colonial escapism.
Much of the mission, because the lay audience could have no sense or truck in the finer details of the travel, was reduced to soap opera banalities and focal points of sheer triviality. In some instances, it was even worse than soap opera, crying out for some definitive, asteroid finish. Prosaic details were offered about lavatory failures, which only matter because people relate to them with faecal and urinary familiarity. “The Artemis II crew, working closely with mission control in Houston,” NASA revealed on April 2, “were able to restore the Orion spacecraft’s toilet to normal operations following the proximity operations demonstration.” That lavatory, at the cost of $23 million, was also said to be the second dearest toilet system ever built. We were also told with quotidian certainty that all lavatories in space tend to end up having failings of some sort, which will no doubt launch a thousand theses on faeces in due, and easy comfort. University examination boards can look forward to the excessive discharge.
Moving items in the spacecraft were also the source of various bromide observations. Nutella, with its hazelnut spread, got what was regarded by the press as the “greatest free advert in history,” floating about fairly unnoticed by the crew – though noticed on the live feed. “When Artemis II broke Apollo 13’s distance record of 248,655 miles from Earth on Monday [April 6],” declared PRWeek, “it was one small step for man … and a giant leap for Nutella’s marketing team.” How wonderful to also note that Nutella was founded in 1964, the same year NASA successfully completed its first lunar mission with Ranger 7.
As for global public interest, NASA and any of those in the business of filming their exploits in space need to be reminded of a rather disturbing truth. Dark, even slightly sadistic voyeurism is never far away from such missions. Impassive spectators are a callous sort, seeking jubilation in shock. An attempt to inject drama is made in media outlets, fluffed up by pundits, about what might have happened to the crew on losing communications for several hours. They must surely make it. Surely. Yet, sickening voyeurism is heavy in such messages, a thanatotic urge. “As the astronauts pass the Moon at about 23:47 BST (18:47 EDT) on Monday, the radio and laser signals that allow the back-and-forth communication between the spacecraft and Earth will be blocked by the Moon itself,” came the bland observation from the BBC. The retching platitude, however, could not be resisted: “For about 40 minutes, the four astronauts will be alone, each with their own thoughts and feelings, travelling through the darkness of space. A profound moment of solitude and silence.” A rather different reading of what being “alone” means, let alone solitude.
On their return to Earth, the press conference given by the crew was saccharine, charmless and unspeakable, suggesting that space travel may narrow the mind. There was the mandatory carpet crawling tribute act for NASA’s management. There were bucketful inanities on team enterprise, the insufferable jargon of organisation teamwork. With emetic conviction, Jeremy Hanson went so far as to call the crew a “joy team” and claim that humans “don’t always do great things. We’re not always in our integrity, but our default is to be good and to be good to one another.” Another crew member suggested that Earth was a “dream boat” (interestingly enough, China’s own spacecraft destined for lunar exploits is named Mengzhou, or Dream Vessel) while the Artemis team were but a mirror for humanity. (Some crew, some mirror.)
Reid Wiseman, along with the rest of the crew, seemed so dazzled as to mischaracterise this proto-colonial endeavour as an effort to unify the fractious human species. “We wanted to go out and try to do something that would bring the world together, to unite the world.” Christina Koch spoke of her husband’s assuring words that she had “made a difference” in transcending divisions. Other competing nation states are unlikely to agree, let alone care for such guff.
Logistically, mechanically, and in terms of engineering, the Artemis II mission can be seen as stunning, startling and impressive, humankind showing yet again an ability to reject nature’s limitations, to foil it, if you will, by going to areas where they have no natural right to be in. In that, we can be impressed. But in everything else, best return to the problems of the Earth, which remain in desperate need of resolution, whatever the wide-eyed space colonists claim.
A Modern Perspective on Nuclear Power Technology – Dr. Gordon Edwards.
24 Apr 2026Hosted by Tanya Novikova of Belarus, this presentation by Dr. Gordon Edwards o April 14, 2026, gives an overview of the nuclear power industry’s efforts to reverse the industry’s steep decline in market share during the last 30 years. The slides can be downloaded at https://www.ccnr.org/GE_Transatlantic… .
US-Iran-Israel War Latest News: What is Project Maven? Here’s how Pentagon is using AI to reshape modern warfare amid Iran war, its main purpose is to…
The initiative shows how AI can help militaries process huge amounts of battlefield information and make faster decisions during conflicts.
By : Shivam Verma, Apr 7, 2026
S-Iran-Israel War Latest News: Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a powerful tool in modern warfare. One of the most talked-about examples is Project Maven, a program launched by the United States Department of Defense. The initiative shows how AI can help militaries process huge amounts of battlefield information and make faster decisions during conflicts.
Originally introduced as a technology experiment, Project Maven has now become one of the most influential defence AI systems used by the US military. Its main purpose is to analyse large volumes of surveillance data and help intelligence analysts identify possible threats much more quickly than traditional methods.
Data overload from modern surveillance
The Pentagon started Project Maven in 2017 to deal with a major problem in modern warfare: the overwhelming amount of data generated by drones and surveillance systems. Military drones and aircraft collect hours of video footage and thousands of images every day…………….
Project Maven uses machine learning and computer vision technology to automatically scan these videos and images. The system identifies objects and patterns that may indicate military targets……………
Tech industry’s role in military AI
Project Maven also shows how closely the defence sector and the technology industry are now connected. In the early stages, major tech companies helped develop the system by providing expertise in machine learning and data analysis.
However, the project also sparked debate within the tech industry. Some employees at large technology companies raised ethical concerns about using artificial intelligence in military operations. Due to internal protests, a few companies decided to step back from the program. https://news24online.com/world/us-iran-war-news-what-is-project-maven-heres-how-pentagon-is-using-ai-to-reshape-modern-warfare-amid-iran-war-its-main-purpose-is-to/796438/
Reprocessing isn’t the solution
by Bart Ziegler, April 6, 2026, https://thecoastnews.com/opinion-reprocessing-san-onofres-nuclear-waste-a-risky-bet/
A decades-old conversation about what to do with the nuclear waste at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is now getting the attention it deserves.
Last December, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted to explore sending spent fuel from San Onofre to a national laboratory for reprocessing. Our organization raised concerns at the time. Now, the county’s own staff has reached the same conclusion.
In a March 9, 2026, report, the county found that commercial-scale reprocessing “has historically been cost-prohibitive and presents security concerns related to plutonium separation” and that “deployment timelines remain uncertain and federal policy does not prioritize reprocessing as a near-term solution.” The report concluded that pursuing a reprocessing initiative “may not be a cost-effective or strategically viable project at this time.”
This comes as pressure to embrace reprocessing intensifies. An energy think tank and Oklo — a recycling company that recently announced a $1.68 billion facility in Tennessee — are pressing Congress to rewrite foundational laws governing nuclear energy to promote commercial recycling.
The Department of Energy is soliciting states to host “nuclear lifecycle innovation campuses” encompassing enrichment, fuel fabrication and waste disposal. Of 24 states that expressed interest, officials say 12 to 15 have “very serious proposals.”
The urgency driving these efforts is real. The 3.6 million pounds of spent fuel at San Onofre sit 100 feet from the Pacific Ocean, near a military base, above the water table and near multiple active fault lines. But handing the waste over to loosely regulated startups with unproven technology and limited oversight is equally a recipe for disaster.
Reprocessing advocates call it “recycling,” which sounds beneficial or even harmless, but it carries its own risks. Reprocessing does not eliminate nuclear waste. It transforms solid spent fuel rods into more unstable forms, including liquid radioactive acid, which is harder to contain.
The only commercial reprocessing plant operated in the United States, in West Valley, New York, ran for six years before shutting down and accruing a cleanup bill that may ultimately cost taxpayers more than $5 billion.
The deeper problem is proliferation. Reprocessing separates plutonium — a key component of nuclear weapons — from spent fuel, creating material that is far easier to divert or steal. Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter halted U.S. commercial reprocessing after India used plutonium from its civilian program to build a bomb in 1974.
The National Academies and Department of Energy laboratories have since concluded that newer reprocessing methods do not meaningfully reduce that risk.
This does not mean reprocessing research should be abandoned. But it does mean lawmakers should stop treating commercial reprocessing as an emergency off-ramp for San Onofre and other sites with stranded nuclear waste.
If federal policy is updated, it should prioritize approaches that avoid separated plutonium, favor low-enriched fuel strategies, minimize high-hazard secondary waste streams and meet rigorous safety requirements.
Reprocessing is not a substitute for the federal government’s obligation to deliver a permanent disposal solution, as required by federal law. Rep. Mike Levin, co-chair of the bipartisan Spent Nuclear Fuel Solutions Caucus, warned that treating reprocessing as a near-term fix for San Onofre “distracts from the work that experts agree is unavoidable.”
Instead, if lawmakers are serious about a nuclear renaissance, they should advance bipartisan legislation already under discussion to establish an independent nuclear waste authority that prioritizes removing waste from high-risk, high-population sites like San Onofre.
Bart Ziegler is the president of the Del Mar-based Samuel Lawrence Foundation.
1 This Month
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PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
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